Chapter 18 Then
Then
The fire burned bright down on the beach as Ava parked her car. It flickered with the breeze, and the shadows of people surrounding it seemed to flicker as well.
I didn’t want to be here.
I’d been listening to my parents fight at home, and while that seemed like a bad thing, I was actually learning things for the first time in over a week.
Like the fact that it was only my dad and two other partners who were being investigated.
That the fourth partner wasn’t suspected for some reason.
My mom had accused that partner of being the one who told.
My dad maintained that there was nothing to tell.
This would all be over soon. My mom cried. This made my dad frustrated.
“Hello? Indy?”
“What?” I asked, snapping out of my thoughts.
Caroline was out of the car already, leaning inside to talk to me. “Are you going to be cold?”
I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. I’d forgotten to grab a hoodie.
I pointed to the beach. “There’s a fire.”
“You know that’s mainly for show,” Ava said from where she stood beside the car. “Unless you’re sitting on it, you will not feel any of its warmth.”
She was right. The ocean was too big to let a puny fire steal its glory.
“I’m okay,” I said, opening my door. When I tried to step out of the car, though, I was stopped short by my seat belt.
Ava laughed at me. “You sleepwalking tonight? It’s not even that late.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I shut the door behind me.
Caroline hooked her hand around my elbow as we walked from the parking lot, down a rocky retaining wall, and onto the beach below. “Are you okay?”
“I’m good,” I lied.
“I don’t want to go back to school on Monday,” she said.
“I do,” Ava said. “This week has been boring. You both have been too busy to do anything.”
“What do you call this?” Caroline asked.
“The first thing we’ve all done together,” Ava answered, as if it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
“I heard you went to Beau’s for Thanksgiving,” Caroline said to me.
“Yeah.”
“How was it?”
“Fine. Nice,” I said.
“Was it super-fancy?” Ava asked. “Crystal and chargers, everyone dressed up, King Grandpa there?”
I chuckled. “Yes. And Harper was there.”
“That made it better or worse?” Caroline asked.
“I just thought she’d be with her family.
She has a family, right?” Maybe I was still bitter that I hadn’t been able to talk to Beau on Thursday.
I thought about telling Ava and Caroline—I trusted them, but there were two of them.
That was already a riskier scenario. They’d talk to each other when I wasn’t around, like they always did.
And if I told them, I’d have to tell Beau, because he was my person.
Then that would be three people. And three people was not the zero my mom had made me promise not to tell.
Odds were that three people would end up as more than three people.
“Of course she has a family,” Ava said.
“I mean a family she does things with,” I said.
“Ask Beau,” she said.
I didn’t want to ask Beau. He’d think I was hating on his girlfriend. I wasn’t. And if I was, it wasn’t for the reasons he’d think.
“Ask me what?” Beau said, joining us.
I started to change the subject when Ava said, “Indy wants to know if Harper is close with her family.”
“Yeah, why?”
“We were just talking about Thanksgiving,” I said.
“She came to ours after we went to hers,” Beau said.
They were going to each other’s Thanksgiving dinners. I didn’t know why that made them seem ten times more serious, but it did. After a few months? “Nice,” I said.
As if she knew we were talking about her, Harper ran over, jumping onto Beau’s back and nearly knocking him down. He managed to stay on his feet, though.
“Hello!” she said to us from her new perch. “Oh! Caroline. Have you met Luca? He’s here tonight. I want to introduce you.”
“Why me?”
“Because he’s a runner too and I think you’d like him.” Instead of jumping down from Beau’s back, she used his shoulders to steer him. “Go this way.”
And Beau actually listened, like he was her car or her horse.
“I’m not following,” Ava said as they walked away. “I am being drawn to the fire like an insect.”
I nodded and she wandered off. I was not drawn to the fire.
I was drawn to the ocean, away from the crowd.
I walked toward it. I was wearing flip-flops tonight, and with each step they kicked sand up onto the back of my jeans.
I reached down and took them off. Sand pushed between my toes until I reached the section compacted by the water.
The ocean was different at night. Ominous.
The rhythmic sound of the waves crashing on the shore felt like a threat versus an invitation.
The only thing visible as I stared out into the water were the whitecaps of breaking waves and the distant horizon, a purple-blue color.
Everything else was dark and endless. I rubbed at my arms as the cold breeze enveloped me.
“I’ll go in if you do,” a voice to my left said.
I looked over to see Cody. “Hey,” I said. “I almost didn’t recognize you without your skateboard.”
“I forgot your name,” he said.
“Not sure you ever got it,” I said, thinking back to our previous interactions. “You were calling me praying mantis or something.”
“Sounds true,” he said.
“Indy,” I provided.
“Indy?” he tried, as if he thought I was lying to him.
“Yes,” I affirmed.
“Short for?”
“Surprisingly nothing.” I imagined that most people with my name probably had a longer version—Indiana or Indianapolis or India—but I didn’t. I was just Indy. One-faceted Indy.
“Like Indiana Jones,” he said.
“Not really like that at all,” I replied, but he wasn’t the first to make that connection and he wouldn’t be the last.
He reached for the back of his hoodie and took it off, along with the T-shirt underneath, dropping them onto the sand. “So?”
My brows dipped.
“Are we going in?”
I shook my head. “It’ll be freezing.”
“And?”
“And I’m too smart for freezing.” I’d already forgotten a sweatshirt. I wasn’t going to jump into the ocean.
“What does that make me?” he asked, dropping his pants. He wore a long pair of underwear that pretty much looked like a swimsuit.
I glanced over my shoulder, suddenly wondering if the whole beach was watching us. Nobody seemed to care. They were either sitting on large blankets or standing around the fire.
I turned my attention back to Cody, who was walking backward toward the water.
“I hope you can swim, because I’m not rescuing you,” I said.
“But what if I need rescuing?”
“You’ll be out of luck,” I said.
He laughed, a short barking laugh. And then he walked straight into the ocean. When he was knee-deep, he held his arms out to the sides and fell backward. He came up with a holler and then was on his feet and running straight for me.
I wasn’t sure why I didn’t back away.
When he stood in front of me, he shook his head and water sprayed all over me. I squeezed my eyes shut and yelped, a smile on my face. Then there were wet arms around me, pulling me against him and soaking my shirt. I gasped, my eyes flying open. I took a step backward.
“You looked ready for that,” he said.
“I wasn’t,” I said.
“Are you now?” he asked.
I swallowed. I wanted to feel something. Anything besides this churning anger that had been rumbling through my body for the past week. My heart thudded heavily in my chest. The wet body print he’d left on me moments ago made me shiver. I nodded. He leaned forward and kissed me with ice-cold lips.